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How to Stop Law Enforcement Reform: Lie
The biggest obstacle to law enforcement and criminal justice reform is willful disinformation campaigns led by many in the law enforcement community.
Americans have become all too familiar with the campaigns hidden behind slogans such as All Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter. While the slogans themselves bear some truth, the sole purpose behind the creation of those campaigns is to counter the message of Black Lives Matter using racism, dog whistles, and blatant disinformation.
To be clear, Black Lives Matter (BLM), is a movement that was created to bring attention to the murder of Black men at the hands of the law enforcement apparatus in the United States. It’s a simple message. Speaking to the (mostly white) folks behind the counter-movements, however, would have you believe that BLM is a terrorist organization.
The supporters of these counter-movements, including law enforcement officers and federal agents, use antagonizing rhetoric to discount the fact-based claims of BLM. Some have gone so far as to promote egregious lies and statistics that are untruthful and labeling activists who speak out on police brutality as Black Identity Extremists — a term the FBI has since abandoned in favor of using the “racially motivated violent extremism” category, which is just as problematic.
The FBI’s strategy titled “Iron Fist” is not just cryptic in name but in its implementation. Leaked documents show the FBI intends to use infiltration and undercover techniques to mitigate threats posed by black extremist groups. These black extremist groups are defined in a section of the FBI documents titled “Key Domain Entities” as: “Likely to target civilian and government entities that are perceived as oppressors, including, but not limited to, law enforcement officers, the U.S. government, members of rival BSE [Black Supremacist Extremists] groups, and individuals based on race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and religion.”
As the FBI downplayed the threat of white supremacist groups, they projected the language used to describe the well-known domestic terrorists onto anti-police brutality activists in an attempt to silence opposition to police policies and procedures. These strategies are based on false narratives employed against BLM activists by the leaders of police…
